The novel ‘Buckingham Palace’, District Six has become Rive's best-selling work. It was a prescribed work for matriculants in the Western Cape from 1997 to 1999 and is still set by teachers at various high school grade levels throughout South Africa. It has been published in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the USA, and translated into many languages including Italian, French and Spanish. It is Rive's most successful work of fiction, both in terms of sales and its impact and popular reception. Unlike his previous work, though, the novel has received minimal serious critical attention, with only a few references to the work by scholars such as Zoe Wicomb and Brenna Munro. Wicomb, in a chapter in Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly's Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid and Democracy, 1970–1995, addresses the question of shame in the formulation of coloured identity. She finds ‘neither the place nor the affectionate portrayal of characters is sentimentalized; the autobiographical text is marked by the ethnographic’ in descriptions of generalised life in the District. Wicomb also finds moments in the novel that ‘covertly or uneasily refer to shame’. In contrast, Zakes Mda dismisses the work as marred by nostalgia.

The novel started life in 1984 as a commissioned newspaper story about childhood and Christmas in District Six. In an interview with Mark Bowman in South in 1989, Rive says: ‘Five or six years ago a local newspaper asked me to write something about a child's Christmas in District Six. I tried to start something every June for a few years until, in 1986, I got stuck in and it just took off. I realised it had become a novel.’ The novel is about colourful, memorable characters in a row of houses called ‘Buckingham Palace’, a fictionalised version of Rive's first home in Eaton Place, in Caledon Street in the District.